A Taste of Our Own Poison

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 13:00:31 +0000
From: Goncalo <goncalo () mail eunet pt>
Subject: A Taste of Our Own Poison
To: dave () farber net


Hello.

An interesting reading from Wired, for IP.

Regards
Goncalo

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http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/view.html?pg=5?tw=wn_tophead_4

A modest proposal: Hold Hollywood hostage till we kill farm subsidies.
By Lawrence Lessig

When America was poor, its citizens "stole." We took the intellectual 
property
of Dickens and other foreign artists without paying for it. We didn't call it
stealing, but they did. We called it a sensible way for a developing nation
to develop. Eventually, we saw it was better to protect their rights as well
as ours - better because we had rights to protect elsewhere, too. But we only
imposed this burden on ourselves when it made sense to do so. Until 1891, we
were a pirate nation.

Things have changed. Now that we're the world's leading exporter of
intellectual property, we're also the most self-righteous about the
importance of protecting it globally. Indeed, we can be vicious in our
self-righteousness - threatening trade wars with developing nations for the
crime of being just like us. Recently, through a series of trade agreements,
we have demanded stricter protection for intellectual property
internationally than US law would allow domestically. (Fair use, for example,
is mandated by our constitution but invisible in these agreements.)

This push to protect intellectual property is defended as just one aspect of
free trade - the aspect that benefits Hollywood. Since Adam Smith penned The
Wealth of Nations, we've understood that borders are best when opened and
when property from one country is respected in another. Free trade so enabled
is the promised elixir for the woes of developing nations. Open your borders,
protect property rights, and prosperity, the Smithies say, will quickly
follow.

The dirty little secret, however, is that we don't respect the free trade
rules that we impose on others. While the US sings the virtues of free trade
to defend maximalist intellectual property regulation, we poison the free
trade that developing nations care about most - agriculture - by subsidizing
farming in the industrialized world to the tune of $300 billion annually.
Rhetoric about family farmers aside, most of that money passes quickly to
agribusiness. This is not Adam Smith; it is corporate welfare par excellence.

There's little developing nations can do about this - individually. But
increasingly they are acting together. One group recently walked out of trade
talks because agribusiness subsidies were not on the table. Others are openly
discussing ways to get US attention.

What developing nations need is better lobbyists. In particular, advocates as
persuasive as Hollywood's lobbyists, who've managed to defend the
entertainment industry's intellectual property rights extremely well. Here's
one way to get power (or the Man) on their side.

A block of powerful developing nations should first take a page from the US
Copyright Act of 1790 and enact national laws that explicitly protect their
own rights only. It would not protect foreigners. Second, these nations
should add a provision that would relax this exemption to the extent that
developed nations really opened their borders. If we reduce, for example, the
subsidy to agribusiness by 10 percent, then they would permit 10 percent of
our copyrights to be enforced (say, copyrights from the period 1923 to 1931).
Reduce the subsidy by another 10 percent, then another 10 percent could be
enforced. And so on.

The mechanism is clumsy, but the message is clear: Both the subsidy of
agribusiness and the subsidy of local culture and science violate the
principles of free trade by ignoring American intellectual property laws.
Both violations are bad. But the two bads should be resolved together.
Indeed, if anything, American subsidies should be ended first. The actual
loss to US firms from piracy worldwide is not terribly high - if "actual
loss" means the amount Americans would get if the piracy ended. (Would
Microsoft be better off if China ended its piracy of Windows and instead used
GNU/Linux - the only OS they could then afford?) But when crops grown by
farmers in Peru rot in the field because the US House of Representatives
cares more about agribusinesses than about Adam Smith, then there is real
harm. The resentment and anger at this American hypocrisy festers as
poisonously as moldering crops in the hot sun.

Of course, this solution won't work unless enough developing nations join
together. But if they do, their message will have meaning. A principle is a
principle. And a content industry keen to defend its "property" on the basis
of that principle would then have an interest in defending principle more
generally.

The world is already skeptical enough about Adam Smith's magic. Throwing
hypocrisy into the bargain can't help.

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